I’m presenting on Disability Justice Design this week at The University of Alabama’s 2021 Digitorium conference, where I’ll be talking (via Zoom!) about my work on two courses at Plymouth State University: EN 3420, Rethinking Medieval and Renaissance Literature, and EN 2490, Rethinking Modern British Literature, 1660-1945.
As the start of the fall semester looms closer, my attention has been drawn away from syllabus construction and blogging and toward a lot of the nitty gritty details of teaching: course schedules, Blackboard shells, writing assignments, and of course scheduling service commitments. In the midst of all that, here’s what I currently have for my Brit Lit I syllabus (you’ll want to scroll down to the “Outline of Topics”:
I am not entirely happy with the course readings, though I am excited about a great deal of the new material I’ve been able to include. The middle third of the class, the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries, features Elizabeth I, Sidney, Pembroke, Shakespeare, Wroth, Donne, Cavendish, and Milton. I’m also including “The Wider World” topic cluster from the Norton, which features selections of travel writing on Africa, the Arctic, the Americas, and the Ottoman Empire. The last third of the class features Bunyan, Behn, and Equiano, and Norton clusters on “Travel, Trade, and the Expansion of Empire,” “Debating Women: Arguments in Verse,” “Slavery and the Slave Trade in Britain,” and “Liberty.” The clusters on travel and slavery were only available online in Norton’s Instructor Resources, not in the anthology itself, but I can easily share the pdfs with my students.
I would love to be able to devote more full weeks to minoritized voices in Brit Lit I, as I’m doing with Equiano in our last week of class discussions. (I could certainly grant Cavendish a full week, courtesy of Liza Blake’s excellent online edition.) However, as I’ve mentioned before, the standard canonical anthology doesn’t allow for such an approach. Most of the full-length works in the Norton, for instance, are the soundly canonical ones. I could jettison the use of an anthology altogether, but then I’m tight-rope walking without the safety net of the historical period introductions and the special topics clusters.
For now, I’ll be sticking to the roadmap I’ve laid out above. Things may change drastically for Fall 2020, but that’s the point of these revisions. Decolonizing a syllabus isn’t a one and done affair, it’s an ongoing commitment to challenging social norms. As we move into the fall semester, I’ll continue blogging about my experiences teaching this new (to me) material.
As I select texts for the Middle Ages portion of my Brit Lit I syllabus, I’ve drawn inspiration from Rebecca Futo Kennedy’s site and from episodes 51 and 52 of The Endless Knot. I find myself continually humbled by how much I need to learn and grateful for the work that others have done. My research thus far has shown me large gaps in my own historical background for the Brit Lit survey, gaps I’ve started filling with The History of Rome. With my usual fall commute, I have a lot of podcasting time built into my schedule.
“The Dream of the Rood,” Vercelli Book
Here are the “suggested texts and authors” from my department’s EN 205 course recommendations:
Early Middle Ages: Beowulf, “Judith,”; “Cædmon’s Hymn,” “The Dream of the Rood,” “The Wanderer,” “The Wife’s Lament”; Early Irish Lyrics
Late Middle Ages: “Ancrene Wisse,” Geoffrey Chaucer, Everyman, Marie de France, Margery Kempe, Thomas Malory, Julian of Norwich, The Second Shepherd’s Play, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
All of these suggestions are of course represented in the Norton Anthology, which is simultaneously a fantastic tool and perhaps the most visible symbol of obstacles to diversifying the syllabus. The introduction to “The Middle Ages” volume shatters any preconceived notions readers might have about monolithic English identity in the period, making it clear that England is a stage for multicultural encounters, linguistic fusion and friction, and imperial ambitions before the Angles, Saxons, or Normans arrived. That said, the Norton’s selections are still almost entirely traditional and canonical: Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Norman writers mostly, with nods to Early Irish Literature and to women writers. And despite the wide-ranging travels of Chaucer’s characters or of Margery Kempe and her pilgrimages, none of the literature connects England to the Middle East or to North Africa, nor to the Byzantine or Ottoman Empires. The Anthologized England remains very much an island.
(The Longman Anthology seems to be a bit more diverse, but only just. The Broadview Anthology, however, seems to put both the Norton and the Longman to shame! I may be switching texts next semester.)
Without further ado, here are my selections week by week:
Week 1: Syllabus; Early Irish Lyrics, 134-5 (handout).
My classes start on a Thursday, so squeezing in a few Irish poems after the syllabus discussion salvages an otherwise wholly procedural week and introduces my students to close reading. I’m also shorting the Middle Ages a day, as each other unit will take eight days of class rather than seven.
Week 2: “The Middle Ages to ca. 1485,” 1-20, 27-9; “Cædmon’s Hymn,” and “The Dream of the Rood,” 30-7; “Judith,” “The Wanderer,” “Wulf and Eadwacer,” “The Wife’s Lament,” and “The Ruin,” 110-26.
The historical introduction to the period does an excellent job of pointing out the multicultural and multilingual nature of the era. These Anglo-Saxon selections hit the canonical “warrior culture” high-notes of Beowulf (which I’ve found is frequently assigned in high schools) while introducing more women’s perspectives, including Judith as warrior woman. If I had another two to three days in this week, I’d gladly add Beowulf back in.
Week 3: Marie de France’s “Milun,” “Lanval,” and “Chevrefoil,” 158-88; Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Cantebury Tales “General Prologue,” 256-82.
I’ll take Marie de France’s representations of gender and sexuality over the Pearl Poet’s any day of the week. Marie de France also enables a discussion of the construction of whiteness and white beauty in the period. Chaucer’s “General Prologue,” of course, does an excellent job of introducing class in the late Middle Ages, and his character sketches are great demos of close reading.
Week 4: “Ancrene Wisse,” 154-7; Thomas Hoccleve’s “My Complaint,” 377-87; Julian of Norwich’s A Book of Showings, 430-442, Margery Kempe’s The Book of Margery Kempe, 442-56.
This week is entirely new material for me, and matter that I’m quite excited about. As a unit, Hoccleve, Julian, and Kempe bring together ability, gender, and religion in exciting ways. Each of these writers present outsider critiques on the Middle Ages that weigh in on the canonical texts from week three. (Thank you to #AcademicTwitter and The International Hoccleve Society for putting Hoccleve on my radar!)
I have mixed feelings about these selections. On the one hand, they hit hard on the topics of ability, class, gender, religion, and sexuality. On the other hand, race goes largely undiscussed. Right now, I expect I’ll be pointing frequently to the lack of coherent “whiteness” or “Englishness” in these texts, emphasizing the multicultural and multilingual tapestry of the Middle Ages whenever possible. I’ll likely supplement class discussion with images from the MedievalPOC Tumblr.
I’m definitely still looking for writers of color for my syllabus. Hadrian, perhaps?
Before I continue with my Brit Lit I syllabus recreation, I want to quickly import a concept from my hobby, gaming: minmaxing. Simply put, to min-max is to take a game, system, or scenario, lay out all the possible options, and to assemble the most streamlined set of options for your particular goals. In role-playing games, min-maxing often results in player characters that do one or two things extremely well and other things not at all. The typical Minmax character is a Conan the Barbarian type: absurdly strong yet illiterate, unstoppable on the battlefield yet inept in any social situation, and other such extremes. So, basically Beowulf.
Today I’d like to minmax my syllabus! If this sort of nitty gritty examination of sprockets and springes annoys you, feel free to skip this post and wait for my examination of Anglo-Saxon literature on Wednesday. Rather than affirming the type of absurd hyper-masculinity typical of minmaxing, however, I’d like to use the technique to aim at a more diverse Brit Lit I course. If anything, the traditional Brit Lit I course is already minmaxed in favor of white, male, imperialist voices. I aim to skew hard away from that tradition in hopes of reaching some small amount of parity.
Here are my particular constraints and goals for Brit Lit I this fall, each followed by a bit of rationale. Some of these goals are self-imposed, others are more systemic. Most if not all are up for debate, but they are the ground rules for how I’ll create and then minmax my syllabus.
Constraints
1) 29 days of Tues/Thurs, 75 minute classes.
29 is the absolute maximum number of days I can fit into the school calendar. That number may be chipped away at by class exams, student conferences, and so forth.
2) 35 sophomore to senior level students, mostly non-English majors.
My expected class informs my teaching decisions. For example, for this general education course I’m less likely to assign Spenser’s Faerie Queen or essays requiring research into literary criticism than I would be if this was an honors section or a junior to senior level course.
3) I commute from Atlanta, GA to Tuscaloosa, AL every week.
This is a long story for another post, but my wife works a 9-5 job as an archivist at Kennesaw State University. The job market being what it is, my best employment option is to keep working at UA and to commute down for three days and two nights each week of the semester. My department’s assistant chair, David Ainsworth, is himself an inveterate minmaxer and a lovely human being. He’s set me up with a Tues/Thurs teaching schedule that allows such a commute.
UA English requires a minimum of 4-6 pages of analytical writing in survey courses and strongly recommends two exams. They also recommend that that 4-6 pages be split up among multiple assignments.
5) Opinion: Multiple essays are better!
I’m a vocal advocate for multiple writing assignments: constant feedback is the best way to let students know what you expect out of their writing and to nurture their growth as writers and thinkers. One set of comments on one term paper simply doesn’t cut it, at least not for my style of teaching.
6) Opinion: Exams are ableist, a waste of class time, and an inefficient measure of learning.
This, too, is a rant for another time, but I have grown to dislike exams and quizzes more and more during my time as a teacher. I’ll be leaning hard on the “recommended” nature of my department’s advice to hold two exams.
Goals
1) To Decolonize and Diversify my syllabus!
The language I like best for how to “balance” my syllabus is that of dominance and resistance. The traditional literary canon is the dominant tradition, the one that has been reified by anthologies, archives, and syllabi. Any voices outside that dominant tradition can be read as resistance. “Literature” or “history” is the sum total of dominance and resistance. I’ll provide enough of the dominant tradition for the resistance to have context, no more. The canon doesn’t need my help propping it up, and I don’t think my students will be any better off if they receive a heavy dose of the dominant tradition from my hands. Far from it. In promoting resistance, I want whenever possible to highlight diverse voices on (in no particular order of priority) race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and religion. This list is not exclusive and is a work in progress.
2) To teach close reading, critical thinking, and perspective taking.
To those ends, I’m more interested in discussion and writing (in and out of class) than comprehensive coverage. I’d much rather have a focused class discussion on ten pages of reading than a wide-sweeping lecture on sixty pages. Reading assignments will be shorter, writing assignments will be frequent, and class engagement will be measured by online discussion posts in preparation for each week of class.
And finally, some Minmax Conclusions
1) Teach no more than one writer per day of class.
If I want everyone’s voice to be distinct, I need to devote class time to each individual voice.
2) Teach no more than one day of class per writer.
Giving an inordinate amount of time to single writers, especially to dominant voices, costs time I could be spending elsewhere. I don’t want to systemically raise some voices over others: the traditional canon has done enough of that.
3) Take time out of class to meet one-on-one with students.
I’m best able to teach writing in a one-on-one setting. It’s amazing what you can accomplish in a ten minute meeting with a student that might otherwise get lost in a normal class period. If I’m committed to giving frequent feedback on student writing, that feedback is most effective in person. If I’m committed to having any semblance of work/life balance, I need to devote work hours to those meetings. That means canceling classes for conferences.
4) Divide the class into six units.
My department recommends six units for Brit Lit I, the standard three volume anthology with each volume split in half: the Early Middle Ages; the Late Middle Ages; the Sixteenth Century; the Seventeenth Century; the Restoration; and the Eighteenth Century.
5) Assign three essays rather than one to two essays and two exams.
Rather than hold a traditional midterm and final exam, I’ll instead assign three 3-5 page essays, one after each “volume” of two units.
6) Take a week at the end of each “volume” to discuss essay drafts with students.
This is a practice from my First-Year Writing courses I want to adapt to Brit Lit I. With less pressure to meet minimum coverage requirements, I can devote more time to meeting one-on-one with students. Right now I plan on canceling a full week late in September (two class sessions), a Tuesday late in October (the week of UA’s Fall Break, which already cancels classes on Thurs and Fri), and the Tuesday of Thanksgiving Week (which students routinely “cancel” themselves). To ease scheduling and my own commute, I’ll be holding these meetings via Blackboard Collaborate, my institution’s preferred version of Skype.
7) Take the last week of class for students to work on creative projects.
As an additional way to resist the dominant tradition and to give students a voice, I’ll end the semester with a creative project: scenes, recordings, artwork, etc. I’m still thinking through the project parameters, but I’m slating “Dead Week” (the week after Thanksgiving and our last week of classes) for creativity.
That leaves 23 class days of a possible 29, including the first day of class.
8) Schedule four days of class for each of the six units. The Early Middle Ages only gets three days, including the first day of class.
Apologies, Middle Ages! I’ll bring in handouts of Early Irish Lyrics for the first day of class so we can hit the ground running.
Now that I’ve laid this groundwork, I believe I can begin to actually construct my syllabus. I need to select 23 writers to represent the diverse range of British Literature from its origins to 1800. In coming posts, I’ll handle that process unit by unit. First up: the Early Middle Ages!
As my title suggests, the biggest change for the EN Lit I survey this year at UA English is the shift from “requirements” to “recommendations.” Here are the new recommendations I promised to talk about in my last post:
The first thing I’d like to close read here is the document title. According to the UA Undergraduate Catalog, the name of the courses in question are English Literature I and II. It’s rather difficult to change the official name of a general education course in an undergraduate catalog (paperwork reasons, I’m sure), but there are really compelling reasons to title these courses Brit Lit rather than English Lit. First and least important, Brit Lit rolls off the tongue more delightfully. Second, based upon its title a course in “English” Lit should either be divided up by language (world Anglophone literature, including translations into English) or should be narrowly focused upon the “English,” a cultural term that erases the long imperial history of Britain. “British” Lit owns that history from the start and is more honest about the contents of the course.
These guidelines recognize the survey as “British” rather than “English” from the start, and they also name themselves recommendations rather than requirements. The two clearest changes from the old recommendations are the lack of required authors and of required minimum coverage for said authors. I cannot overstate how much freedom this gives instructors! It’s probably the cornerstone of independent course design, one of the great creative freedoms of our profession.
“EN 205 is a chronological, historical survey that consists of three primary components: 1) It covers the British literary tradition from its beginnings in the Middle Ages through the end of the eighteenth century; 2) It introduces students to a range of texts in different sub-genres of poetry, drama, and prose prevalent in this literary tradition; 3) It offers a balance of major canonical and significant, less canonical works within the different time periods. Students should learn to read contextually and should be exposed to the significant historical, political, economic, intellectual, and social events and movements that characterized this period. Students should be exposed to the diversity of the English literary tradition in terms of genre, gender, and subject matter.”
The emphasis on “chronological” and “historical” might be a bit stifling, but my own experience with the course tells me these are necessary elements of the survey. So much of Brit Lit I can be deeply weird to our students, and a historical backdrop can be the raft that keeps them afloat. Without some chronology, the pieces don’t cohere into a larger whole. Without history, Brit Lit can masquerade as English Lit, or, worse yet, Literature writ large. One should, however, strive to keep all historical frames from becoming hegemonic ones — a constant struggle in any survey course.
The first two components of Brit Lit read rather like descriptions of the standard anthology! I dare say that until we reach the promised paradise of an open access future, anthologies like the Norton will remain the necessary backbone of survey courses. (More on the Norton anon). The third component is more interesting: “3) It offers a balance of major canonical and significant, less canonical works within the different time periods.” What exactly does balance mean or look like in a diversified syllabus? 50% “major” canon and 50% lesser canon? I’m inclined to somewhat agree with the math but not with the framing. Assuming a class of non-English-majors (my target audience at UA), I can’t presume that my students will already know Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and others. These writers are the elephants in the room that everyone is talking about, and much of the value from “less canonical works” can come from the way those works resist those dominating conversations. Rather than a language of “major” and “lesser,” I want to reach for a language that better articulates the power struggles at hand. Perhaps “hegemonic” and “resistant”? “Majority” and “minority” voices, with a heavy dose of the value of minority and dissenting voices? (I’m currently reading Tobin Siebers’ Disability Theory, so this articulation is on my mind.) Much more thought is required of me.
The next to last sentence in the above quotation I take to be evocative rather than prescriptive. The last sentence, however, is quite the powder keg: “Students should be exposed to the diversity of the English literary tradition in terms of genre, gender, and subject matter.” The term “diversity” brings with it connotations of human identity: diversity along the lines of race, gender, sex, class, ability, religion, and so forth. “Gender” invokes that frame while “genre” does not. “Subject matter” could go either way. It could be a soft way of suggesting that instructors incorporate diverse identities into their syllabi, and a soft suggestion might be prudent on a university campus with an active Turning Point USA chapter and that continues its struggle with desegregation; there are real fears among instructors at UA that flagging a course as progressive risks alienating conservative students and thus foreclosing any chance of reaching those students. (I have less and less patience with these fears, in myself and in others.) However, “diversity” of “subject matter” sounds dangerously close to “diversity of opinion,” an innocuous sounding concept that has become in recent years a far-right dog whistle for the protection of anti-diverse hate speech (RationalWiki.Org entry on “Social Justice War,” “Real Diversity” section; I need stronger citations on this trend, but my research is coming up short this morning. Please advise!)
In any case, these recommendations do not explicitly encourage diversity in terms of race, sex, class, ability, or religion. One might blame the Norton Anthology for this lacuna: in practice, the Norton has long been the benchmark anthology at UA, a standard reinforced by the new and used textbook markets. As is clear from Greenblatt’s introduction to the 10th edition, the Norton has done a lot of work in recent years to include more women in its selections. It has not done as good of a job in other areas of diversity. But between the Norton and departmental course recommendations, which is the cart and which the horse? In any case, I have zero power to change what does or does not get included in the Norton. Thanks to the difference between “requirements” and “recommendations,” however, I have a lot of power over what gets included in my courses, and I aim to use it.
It seems I have more to say on this subject than I realized, so I’m going to post more frequently, lest I run out of summer before I’ve finalized my syllabus. Tomorrow I’m going to lay out my own ground rules for syllabus construction, and on Wednesday I’ll begin assembling texts period by period. Thanks again for reading!
Sprockets and Springes 